Futures of Learning

In our series of blog posts on new media practices in Japan, we have tried to describe some of what makes Japan distinctive as a new media environment, while also noting the ways in which the patterns we see in Japan are part of a set of cross-cutting transnational trends and networks. Although we have seen evidence of Japan as being a unique technological Galapagos, it is an island that is thoroughly interconnected with the technology trends in other high tech settings such as South Korea and the US. For example, just as in the case of South Korea, China, and the US, widespread youth adoption of new technology has been a site of moral panic, inciting concerns about Internet and mobile phone addiction, and the negative psychological effects of gaming. These moral panics are also evidence of the centrality of youth culture in defining new media trends in all of these settings. In addition to the transnational rise of mobile youth cultures, gaming, and social networks sites, we have also seen the rise of common genres of new media expression. Gaming idioms entering the everyday youth lexicon and the rise of networked fan cultures are examples of this, as well as the rise of remix culture and appropriative literacies. It is clear that there is a generational experience that is shared across national contexts that have made the turn to digital culture, evidence of a transnational youth culture centered on networked popular culture and digital media. Although the specific online sites that youth congregate on vary considerably across different contexts, the underlying social patterns often feel quite similar.

Although there are clearly cultural commonalities and shared platforms that we see in Japan, we have also seen evidence of some distinctive contextual features that have made Japan and incubator for some interesting digital culture variations. The most obvious distinctive feature of Japanese new media adoption is the centrality of mobile media, particularly for Internet access. This has led to distinctive patterns of access to social network sites, gaming, and other forms of online content like the keitai novel. The centrality of teenage girls’ culture in defining mobile media practice is worthy of note. New genres like the keitai novel, and practices of text messaging and purikura photos are clearly coded as girl culture, and ever since the rise of mobile media, girls have been positioned as technological and cultural innovators in these domains.

On the geekier side of things, Japan’s otaku culture is also distinctive, and has been a key driver of many important trends in Japanese digital culture. Like we have seen in the US, geek culture has driven innovation in online communication and media literacy. The form that this geek culture takes is distinctive, however, in being closely integrated to Japanese popular culture such as manga, anime and gaming. Another reason for the unique form that otaku culture takes is the particularly commercial and technologized urban culture that supports certain forms of cultural specialization. Particularly in Tokyo, we see urban districts such as Akihabara and Ikebukuro supporting a density of place-based geek culture that has given rise to robust game arcade communities and urban meet-ups of otaku. South Korea’s PC bangs and China’s Internet cafes are probably the closest analog, but in urban districts in Tokyo we often see extreme forms of specialization around particular genres of anime or gaming culture.

We hope this series of blog posts have given you some sense of the specific context of Japan’s new media adoption, and the state of research in the field. Please look forward now to Araba Sey’s series on new media practices in Ghana, which will give you the flavor of a very different national context.